How to avoid spiralling costs for digital marketing

Aug 22, 2022

Paying more and getting less has become  the new normal for digital marketers trying to find customers. Conservative estimates say digital cost-per-acquisition has increased at least 50% in the past 5 years. This trend was driven by greater competition for online eyeballs as more and more businesses transitioned to digital marketing and accelerated massively as the COVID-19 pandemic effectively eliminated bricks and mortar options for consumers.

Many businesses who were early adopters of digital marketing benefited from the low cost of digital relative to traditional advertising channels but those days are over, never to return. These days most digital marketers are facing a double whammy of increasing costs and decreasing effectiveness. Paying more for less is the new normal. To make matters worse access to consumers is being restricted by the demise of third-party data, email opt-outs and do-not-call registers. The net effect of these trends is to make customer acquisition more challenging than its ever been with some businesses and categories effectively priced out of the market.

In this context savvy marketers are re-assessing the customer acquisition potential of offline communication channels previously abandoned as too expensive during the digital gold rush. Direct mail, to give just one example, is now a much more attractive proposition. The particular benefits of DM are well established and it has never truly gone away. rather it became a niche channel for particular industry segments as it was hard to justify the cost of printing and postage relative to sending an email for practically nothing. When faced with rising costs and falling effectiveness of digital channels the proven ability of DM to engage customers and prompt action becomes a much more attractive proposition.

Engaging – well executed direct mail massively outperforms email in open rates and conversions. It’s the touch point you can actually touch and this tactile quality makes it much more memorable and likely to lead to conversion. 

Cut-through – I​f it’s in your letterbox and has your name on it you are going to look at it. Contrast this to your email inbox where promotional emails are filtered into their own folder where they are destined to remain unopened and unloved. 

Reach –  Every household and business in Australia has a mailing address with no equivalent to opt-out or DNC. 

Trackable – Digitally integrated print provides robust performance data via QR codes and personalised URLs.

Affordable – production values and costs can be dialled up or down relative to your life-time customer value

Conversify are experts in using direct mail to find new customers both on its own and as part of multi-channel campaigns. Our proprietary Marketfinda customer acquisition system is the key to our success. We work with you to design and execute Marketfinda campaigns that align with your growth goals. Through our strategic partnerships with data wholesalers we are able to source the freshest,  highest quality contact data in Australia. These data sets are segmentable on an almost infinite matrix of variables. This sophisticated targeting greatly increases the effectiveness of Marketfinda campaigns, eliminating waste and driving up ROI. 

If you want an alternative to the digital marketing arms race with its law of diminishing returns, if you want to pay less and get more, then Marketfinda is exactly what you’re looking for. Contact us today because if you don’t you can be almost certain your competitors will.